Hunger Moon Rising Read online

  I sighed and hauled myself out of the chair to start unpacking the boxes. Maybe it would help if I could tell Dani my secret—let her know the real me. But as much as I loved her, I knew I could never do that. I had worked too hard to gain her trust to hit her with the fact that not only did werewolves exist, but I was one of them.

  I put my bobble-head Dali Lama down on the surface of the desk and studied the thumbprints I'd carelessly left there. It had been stupid of me to let myself get so rattled that I forgot to control my strength. I wondered what Dani would say if she knew I was capable of not only lifting the entire desk myself, but of holding it over my head with one hand and bench-pressing it.

  Superhuman strength was one of the few advantages of being one of the Lunar Challenged, as my mom jokingly called it. That and super sharp senses, cat-like—or in my case wolf-like—reflexes, and the ability to see in the dark were the only compensation I got for living with the curse that had landed on every male in my family for generations. Why only males? I don't know, but there were no female werewolves or shapeshifters of any kind that I knew of.

  My grandfather was a were, too, and my dad had been one as well. Dad had died when I was very young, so he wasn't around to tell me what the hell was happening to me when I started getting hairy—and I mean really hairy—once a month after I hit puberty. Luckily for me, Grandpa was a pretty cool guy, and he told me exactly what to expect and what to do about it.

  The first time he took me to a pack gathering I was twelve, scared as hell, and very impressionable. What I saw there turned me off being a werewolf for good, but what could I do? It's not like the AMA recognizes lycanthropy as a genuine disease, so there aren't any cures for it, and nobody is doing any “please help the poor shapeshifting children” telethons. I had to do the best I could and deal with it in my own way—which I did.

  It took me years, but what I found out was this: living with lycanthropy is like living with epilepsy or panic attacks. With the right management, it can be controlled.

  Of course, there aren't any medications, but there is treatment—self treatment, that is. A lot of people only know what they see on TV and in the movies, or read in books. They think—if they think about anything so supposedly mythical and fictitious as werewolves at all—that when the full moon rises in the sky, the werewolf has to change to his animal form. But that's simply not true. There's no need to get furry once a month or even once a year, as long as you keep yourself under control. And by that I mean both mentally and physically.

  To that end, I meditate, run five miles daily, and do power Yoga three times a week. I'm a practicing vegetarian and a non-practicing Buddhist, which drives my mom nuts, since I was raised Catholic. In high school and college, I avoided all the usual male-centric sports like soccer and football, even though every coach I'd ever met was dying to get me on the team. I guess they looked at my size and strength and thought, “What a waste.” But spikes in testosterone and adrenaline make the change harder to control, and I wanted to stay human more than I wanted any pseudo-glory I could earn on a football field. Instead, I participated in solitary sports like weight lifting and long distance running. I still like to run the occasional marathon.

  Another thing that makes the change hard to control is being around the pheromones other weres give off, so I avoided them, too. After that one meeting when I was twelve, I never went to another pack gathering, even though my grandfather was always trying to talk me into it. He wanted me to give the whole were culture another chance, but I didn't want anything to do with it.

  After years of struggling, I finally had my lycanthropy in hand, and at that point in time I was proud to say that I hadn't had an uncontrolled change in over five years. In fact, I hadn't even had a controlled change in over three years, which meant—to me anyway—that I had been mostly successful in keeping my were nature buried. Three years since I'd let the genie—that part of me that was other—out of its bottle. Sometimes I could even forget, for weeks at a time, that I had the curse, or disease, or whatever you wanted to call it hanging over me in the first place.

  Of course, it helped that I was an even-tempered guy—what Dani called “a real sweetheart,” or I never would have managed it. Losing your temper or letting yourself get too emotional is almost guaranteed to bring on the change, especially if the moon is full or near full. But whenever I felt that part of myself trying to rise and take control, I concentrated on something else, and it would usually pass. Instead, I kept myself busy with work. That wasn't hard when being at work meant being around Dani—not that it was doing me any good.

  I sighed again and started hooking up the computers just the way she wanted them—with hers on one side of the desk and mine directly opposite. That way we could bounce ideas off each other without actually reading the other person's prose. Dani was very secretive about her work until it was actually ready to be read. She had a hard, punchy writing style that was the direct opposite of my own, more flowing wording. But somehow, when we wrote together, our differences made our prose stronger. I would've liked to think that our writing was a metaphor for the rest of our lives—that everything we did could be done better together—but I wasn't about to say that to Dani. She already thought I was a hopeless romantic, which, I suppose, was true—at least the hopeless part, anyway.

  “Bingo,” I said under my breath as Dani's flat-screen popped to life. I pulled the connecting cables around the side of the desk so they mostly hid the two thumbprints I had left there. I wanted them out of sight and out of mind so Dani's curious brain didn't start getting any ideas. “Shouldn't have happened,” I muttered to myself, still upset by the visual proof of my lack of control. It wouldn't have happened, either, if it hadn't been so close to the full moon. Although, full moon or not, I usually had better control. For the next few days until the moon waned, I was really going to have to keep a tight rein on myself.

  “Hey, partner, looking good.” Dani's voice interrupted my thoughts, and I looked up to see her posed in the doorway with her hands on her hips, gazing with satisfaction at the neatly arranged desk. The short gray skirt she wore made her legs go on forever, and the white silk shirt she had paired it with was gauzy and light, showing the shadow of her bra beneath it. I could see her full breasts nestled in their lace cups if I looked hard enough, which I was trying not to. But my eyes kept returning to her curvy form like iron filings drawn to a magnet.

  Dani always managed to combine the best of professional and sexy no matter what she wore, and lots of times I couldn't help staring at her. She never seemed to mind. In fact, sometimes I thought she liked the way I looked at her—as long as looking was as far as it went.

  “Hey.” I tried to grin at her and make my voice sound casual. “Any luck tracking down the missing girl?”

  She frowned and ran a hand through her hair. “No—I ran a check, but no girl with the last name of McKinsey has been taken from the area or reported missing in the last two years.”

  “Well, I guess that's that.” I shrugged, feeling relieved.

  “I guess so,” Dani said, but she didn't sound convinced. I knew I needed to distract her or she'd never let it go.

  “Ya know,” I said, rubbing my neck and trying to look pitiful. “I think I may have pulled something when we moved the desk. I didn't notice it before but now…” I let the sentence trail off with a theatrical wince, as though I was in terrible pain. I'm not a very good actor, but my little scene had the desired effect.

  “Oh, Ben, I'm so sorry. And you were already so tense.” Dani was by my side at once, wanting to know where it hurt.

  “From my neck all the way down to my lower back,” I said, deciding to keep her busy awhile. Dani gives great massages, and even though this would be my second one of the day, I could never resist a chance to have her hands all over me.

  She sat me down in a chair, then changed her mind. “I can't work this way,” she said, tugging at my shirt. “Not and really do you any good. I won't be able to ge